Browse Recent Book Reviews

Picture Ecology: Art and Ecocriticism in Planetary Perspective is a collection of essays that came out of a symposium held at Princeton University dedicated to the Princeton University Art Museum’s exhibition, Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment, organized in 2018–19 by Karl Kusserow and Alan Braddock. The catalog accompanying that exhibition and Braddock’s other editorial venture with Christoph Irmscher, A Keener Perception: Ecocritical Studies in American Art History (2009), form two major anchor points in the field of ecocritical art history, to which Picture Ecology is a ready addition. While these previous volumes focused on the art of the United… Full Review

From the outset, Nadja Millner-Larsen’s Up Against the Real: Black Mask from Art to Action mobilizes categories tied to 20th-century avant-gardism, populating the siege against the division between art and life with a wide array of radical characters and groups from heterogeneous backgrounds. As Millner-Larsen suggests, what most of them have in common is a “minor” status in the histories of the avant-garde after 1945 (14–15), but whose practices and redefinitions of the social role of art point to crucial contacts and thresholds between aesthetics and politics often not found in the discussions surrounding the “major” avant-gardes of the period… Full Review

In April 2023, with 1.429 billion people, India, the world’s fifth-largest economy, surpassed China as the world’s most populous country. What does this say about the nation’s art ecology? Does it translate to a proliferation of art galleries? A thriving art market? A flourishing of art schools? A diversity of art practices? With her training in both anthropology and art history, and based on decades of fieldwork in Mumbai and Delhi, Karin Zitzewitz has written an excellent and lavishly illustrated book that examines how artists in India, over seventeen prosperous years before a market crash, have put themselves on the… Full Review

In A Delicate Matter: Art, Fragility, and Consumption in Eighteenth-Century France, materiality is the message. Oliver Wunsch explores the shifting, often competing meanings of physical fragility in eighteenth-century French art. Originally an aspect of courtly social aesthetics, delicacy (délicatesse) became an aspect of objecthood as well as personhood, a commodified material quality that was diversely cultivated, savored, criticized, and resisted. In an expanding, speculative market animated by artists seeking recognition and newly wealthy collectors seeking cultural legitimacy, “delicacy structured debates over morality, status, and power” (12).  Wunsch links the creation and reception of materially unstable artworks with… Full Review

The Virginia Museum of Fine Art’s (VMFA) Elegy is an exhibition by MacArthur Fellow Dawoud Bey and curated by the incomparable Valerie Cassel Oliver. Developed by Bey in Louisiana, Virginia, and Ohio between 2017 and 2023, Elegy presents three distinct and intertwined collections of large-scale black-and-white photographs alongside two immersive multi-channel color video installations. This cohesive triad highlights held narratives of enslavement and emancipation along a journey that follows rivers and trails up and across the American landscape. Bey’s photographs frame terrestrial marks of US history in black and white, accentuate the sadness and the triumphs pressed into… Full Review

Claudine A. Chavannes-Mazel and Linda IJpelaar’s edited volume, The Green Middle Ages: The Depiction of Plants in the Western World, 600–1600 begins with a caveat: the title may center on the word “green,” but the text does not tackle ecology in the modern sense. Instead, this translation of their 2019 Dutch language volume De Groene Middeleeuwen: Duizend jaar gebruik van planten 600–1000 explores the impact of plants on European book traditions from late antiquity through early modernity. These interactions are manifold and diverse, ranging from the representation of plants in pharmacological texts to the use of plants themselves as art… Full Review

From the endearing oddness of its cover, which presents an image of Thomas Jefferson’s recognizable head on the body of a strutting rooster, Alison M. Stagg’s Prints of a New Kind: Political Caricature in the United States, 1789-1828 draws the reader into an often-unfamiliar world of early American political caricature filled with human-animal hybrids, petty personal grievances, and dizzying literary and historical references. Discussing prints made and distributed in the United States during the early republic, Stagg uses exhaustive research into archival and published sources to uncover new details about the creation and dissemination of early American political prints. This… Full Review

The title of Teotihuacan, The World Beyond the City, an important volume edited by Kenneth G. Hirth, David M. Carballo, and Barbara Arroyo, could well serve as an object lesson in the meaningful use of the humble comma. Since the advent of concerted archaeological and art historical research on Teotihuacan, Mexico, the earlier of the two largest urban centers of Mesoamerica, the culture’s inscrutability has been in proportion to its singular significance. An abbreviated list of things unknown about the city would include its primary language, its internal social and governance structures (evaluated here by Carballo, 57–96), and why… Full Review

The Vitae patrum records the lives of the Desert Fathers and Mothers. They included early Christian ascetics, such as saints Elias, Onuphrius, and Mary of Egypt, who went off into the wilderness, where they underwent extreme acts of contemplation, deprivation, and penance to achieve a closer connection with God. The most well-known visualizations of these eremitic saints appear in large-scale paintings, such as the monumental fourteenth-century Thebaid fresco in the Camposanto, Pisa. Denva Gallant’s Illuminating the Vitae patrum: The Lives of the Desert Saints in Fourteenth-Century Italy focuses instead on the lesser-studied imagery in the Morgan Library’s Ms M.626, the… Full Review

The Comitán Valley: Sculpture and Identity on the Maya Frontier expands the scope of Classic Maya art beyond the now-familiar canon based on sites from the Guatemalan Peten, Yucatan, and Belize. The Comitán Valley, located in the Mexican state of Chiapas, is on the western edge of the continuous distribution of Maya societies. Covering four distinct settlements, Caitlin Earley provides the first regional-scale examination of sculpture from the area, showing how the frontier location fostered diverse developments that explored different potentials within Classic Maya culture. Each chapter provides clear illustration of the known sculptures, their settings, and comparisons with thematically… Full Review